Editor’s note: This story has been modified from its original print version to include the location of the new facility.
In August, the ultimate workplace nightmare came true at Hartford Distributors in Manchester when a former truck driver shot and killed eight employees and wounded three others before turning the gun on himself.
Since the morning Omar Thorton went on the deadliest workplace shooting spree in Connecticut history, Hartford Distributors was forced to recover from the terrors of that day and move onward as one of the largest beer distributors in Connecticut.
On Oct. 31, Hartford Distributors moved upward when the Manchester company merged with South Windsor specialty beer company Franklin Distributors to form a 168-employee organization with a robust variety of beer.
“The shooting was a very tough thing for all of us to go through,” said Jim Stack, president of the newly formed entity to be known as HDI. “It certainly slowed some things down for us in coming together, but it did not stop us.”
As the shooting put plans such as the merger in the background, one of the items delayed was a new 70,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility in Manchester to consolidate operations of Hartford and Franklin to suit the company’s new role as a mass and specialty beer distributor.
The man who was the project liaison on the new facility — Louis Felder — was killed in the August shooting. Felder — 50 of Stamford, a father of three — did most of the legwork for the new facility and worked directly with Newfield Construction Inc. on its building of the new facility.
As the company recovered in the aftermath of Felder’s loss, Steve Hollander, HDI’s executive vice president, stepped into the liaison role. Hollander, who was wounded in the August shooting, made sure the new facility construction got back on track.
“There was a little void in the project, but they got all the pieces together,” said Stephen Buccheri, Newfield Construction project manager. “They are a great bunch of people over there, and it really is a tragedy what happened.”
The new facility broke ground at the end of October, and the steel started going up in early December. When complete, the facility — adajacent to Hartford Distributors’ current Manchester facilities — will have 10 loading docks and 10,000 square feet of refrigerator space, operating on new technology that can use the cold outside to keep the refrigerated temperature cool. The company’s warehouse space will be doubled.
More importantly, the new facility marries the specialties of the two companies. While Hartford Distributors did the bulk of its businesses delivering large orders of Anheuser-Busch products, Franklin Distributors has more than 1,600 specialty products delivered in small quantities.
“You never knew there is quite the fine art to distributing beer,” Buccheri said. “The whole idea with the new facility is to be more effective in the use of their labor force.”
A state-of-the-art inventory management system in the new Manchester facilities enables the company to store this variety in such a way that different brands can be taken down in small quantities and matched together for shipment along with large quantities of Anheuser-Busch. The whole operation will be completely computerized.
“We are both going to the same buildings, delivering there. Why not put everything on the same truck?” Stack said.
The new building also features energy efficient lighting and refrigeration. The company is considering putting solar photovoltaic panels on the roof of the warehouse to make the whole operation as environmentally friendly as possible.
The project will be complete before Memorial Day.
When the new facility comes online, the former rivals will operate as one out of the same facility with HDI having a Franklin Fine Beer Division. Although no layoffs have occurred, management has been consolidated but the sales teams remain separate. The new company now delivers mass and specialty beer to the bulk of Connecticut, save for New Haven, Fairfield and Litchfield counties.
“We are both family-run businesses, and the customers are very important to us,” Stack said. “Now we are one very strong family business, very customer oriented.”
The shooting, while heartbreaking, wasn’t enough to stop the company from moving onto bigger and better business. The tragedy couldn’t keep the merger from happening; and when the new facility opens in the spring, the two companies will have finished what has been years in the making.
“We did not let it stop our families from coming together,” Stack said.
